How I Serve My Portfolio Over The Terminal

A few months ago, I came across $ ssh terminal.shop, the best way to order coffee - via the terminal. Using the SSH protocol to order coffee was a very unconventional method, but it got me thinking. How could I try to replicate this and put my portfolio over the terminal?

I started digging into how the SSH protocol works. It involved private keys, public keys, and key exchange in order to establish a connection over the internet. But I just wanted to create a simple method for serving my portfolio. I thought about finding a simpler protocol to implement. After a bit of research, I found out about netcat and how it can be used to establish simple TCP connections over the internet.

After a bit more research, I wrote a simple program to echo text over a TCP socket. This is how to implement it in Python:

import socket

HOST = 'localhost'
PORT = 1810

with socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) as s:
    s.bind((HOST, PORT))
    s.listen()
    conn, addr = s.accept()
    with conn:
        print('Connected by', addr)
        while True:
            data = conn.recv(1024)
            if not data:
                break
            conn.sendall(data)

I ran it over my local machine and connected to it using netcat:

$ nc localhost 1810
Hello, World!
Hello, World!

Using this, I understood that netcat sends any data typed in the terminal to the server, and the server can respond back with any data. Using this knowledge, I modified the program to include my name as a banner whenever a connection is established, and then started defining commands that users can type to get more information about me. I included the > prompt to make it feel more interactive.

I then decided to add a chatbot to allow the users to ask questions about me in natural language. I defined the CHAT command, that passes any of the text after it to an AI model, Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite in my case, and returns a streaming response back to the user. This way, users can ask any questions about me and get a response back in real-time. The model has all context about me and the projects I have worked on, so it can answer any questions related to that.

Finally, I decided to host it on an existing VPS I had on Microsoft Azure. I created a simple Dockerfile to containerize it, and then used GitHub Actions to automatically build and deploy it to my VPS whenever I push changes to the main branch.

Once deployed, I went onto my CloudFlare dashboard and created a new DNS record, sh.manan.cloud, that points to my VPS's IP address. Now, anyone can connect to my portfolio over the terminal using netcat:

$ nc sh.manan.cloud 1810

Go ahead, give it a shot!

This entire project was a fun way to learn about TCP sockets, netcat, and just to experiment with unconventional ways of serving a portfolio. If you have any questions about it, feel free to reach out to me on hello@manan.cloud!

The entire source code for this project is available on GitHub: https://github.com/MananGandhi1810/terminal-portfolio

PS: The port 1810 was chosen because it represents my birthday, 18th October.